The Old Wives' Tale eBook

Perhaps she was afraid of miracles. Mr. Scales
sitting on her mother’s doorstep in the middle
of the snowy night had assuredly the air of a miracle,
of something dreamed in a dream, of something pathetically
and impossibly appropriate—­’pat,’
as they say in the Five Towns. But he was a tangible
fact there. And years afterwards, in the light
of further knowledge of Mr. Scales, Sophia came to
regard his being on the doorstep as the most natural
and characteristic thing in the world. Real miracles
never seem to be miracles, and that which at the first
blush resembles one usually proves to be an instance
of the extremely prosaic.

III

“Is that you, Mrs. Baines?” asked Gerald
Scales, in a half-witted voice, looking up, and then
getting to his feet. “Is this your house?
So it is! Well, I’d no idea I was sitting
on your doorstep.”

He smiled timidly, nay, sheepishly, while the women
and Mr. Povey surrounded him with their astonished
faces under the light of the gas-lamp. Certainly
he was very pale.

“But whatever is the matter, Mr. Scales?”
Mrs. Baines demanded in an anxious tone. “Are
you ill? Have you been suddenly—­”

“Oh no,” said the young man lightly.
“It’s nothing. Only I was set on
just now, down there,”—­he pointed
to the depths of King Street.

“Set on!” Mrs. Baines repeated, alarmed.

“That makes the fourth case in a week, that
we know of!” said Mr. Povey. “It
really is becoming a scandal.”

The fact was that, owing to depression of trade, lack
of employment, and rigorous weather, public security
in the Five Towns was at that period not as perfect
as it ought to have been. In the stress of hunger
the lower classes were forgetting their manners—­and
this in spite of the altruistic and noble efforts of
their social superiors to relieve the destitution due,
of course, to short-sighted improvidence. When
(the social superiors were asking in despair) will
the lower classes learn to put by for a rainy day?
(They might have said a snowy and a frosty day.) It
was ‘really too bad’ of the lower classes,
when everything that could be done was being done
for them, to kill, or even attempt to kill, the goose
that lays the golden eggs! And especially in a
respectable town! What, indeed, were things coming
to? Well, here was Mr. Gerald Scales, gentleman
from Manchester, a witness and victim to the deplorable
moral condition of the Five Towns. What would
he think of the Five Towns? The evil and the danger
had been a topic of discussion in the shop for a week
past, and now it was brought home to them.

“I hope you weren’t—­”
said Mrs. Baines, apologetically and sympathetically.